It’s relentless, from the first bar of the cliched piano intro. As the first episode opens, Tim is followed by a bunch of subteen boys who taunt him about his lack of manliness as he puts the bins out. That sets the monotonous pattern from then on as Tim fails again and again to live up to masculine standards. He even visits JG’s workplace with a sandwich. Emasculating! His day continues as a mounting litany of humiliations. Gillard calls him “my little T-pot”. And while the Tim Mathieson character bears most of the weight of the superannuated tropes, as he becomes ever more irritated and frustrated (and as oblique jokes about his manhood are made by the minute) we’re given to understand that JG’s relationship is doomed to failure. A woman simply shouldn’t be under work pressure. Everyone knows it’s the woman who makes the damned sandwich, amirite? Even in the first episode we feel the relationship is so strained it must eventually crack, and then she’ll be all alone with only Bill Shorten the terrier and Bob Katter for company, won’t she? And serve her right for being an emasculating prime minister and destroying her man.

Clearly – still – the idea that men taking the role of partner to a successful woman are pathetic, and they’re pathetic because they are then comparable to a woman, which is terrible, still has great traction. I’m just about to watch Rush: a woman running about in a flak suit with a gun might be frowned on by some conservatives, but no-one sees her as pathetic and laughable. Women taking on mens’ roles might meet with resistance, but it’s because they’re a subordinate moving up. A man taking on (what’s still defined as) a woman’s role is looked on as moving down.

I can’t help but wonder what this meanspirited and patriarchy-fellating little show will do to the real-life relationship. No matter how Mathieson presents himself in his everyday life, he now has the “man emasculated by successful woman” lesson rammed down his throat weekly, and it can’t help but affect how he’s treated by the public when he goes out. I imagine it can’t help but affect the dynamic between the two of them. And if anything happens to their relationship, then the world will be all, “See, there you go, ball buster.”

And I can’t help but wonder how many teenage girls are abandoning plans for a bigger role in the wide world, because you know, it just makes you unloveable and makes your partner miserable.

Thanks, ABC.
 
 
 
Crossposted at Larvatus Prodeo

As the title implies, Bearings is about people who are in flux, going through changes and in need of a map and compass. These stories could be just a good wallow in misery and torment like the memoirs that are so popular now, but Swann avoids this contemporary cliche. Except perhaps for one story, Slow to Learn, the stories in Bearings contain as much hope and affirmation as sadness. Swann also avoids too much earnestness. This isn’t just kitchen sink drama. Swann has a feeling for the little weird twist which takes the stories out of the Social Issue Story realm. In the novella, Silver Hands, where a sculptor faces the simultaneous loss of her skill, through tendonitis, and her sense of control over her family life, there’s a scene on a beach involving a penguin which I can just imagine being filmed for the next Tropfest. Swann can be whimsical, but not arch. The emotional tone rings true throughout, and her descriptive passages are beautiful and economical.

On the night of his father’s death, David felt its approach. The atmosphere of the death room was not unlike that of a birth room: a space between worlds. Something was vast and wide open, with the force of a gale yet utterly still. (Lovest Thou Me)
…
When jogging, he imagines what it might be like to hold his child for the first time. The baby skips across his mind like a stone skimming a river, and his heart skips with anxious joy.
…
His own, living body registers horror in increments: the skin, the stomach, the heart. For a moment he feels he might vomit. He reaches to his hip and draws out the mobile phone. It is silver, unnaturally bright in the muted landscape. Never has he felt more grateful for this tiny cold portal to another world. (The Easter Hare)

Bearings travels on the dark side while illuminating the things which make that dark side endurable. It’s neither Pollyannaish nor excessively traumatising (David Vann, I’m looking at you!) I enjoyed reading it and I’ll be looking out for Swann’s next publication.

Thanks to Affirm Press for the review copy of the book.

The Down Under Feminist Carnival is having its 25th anniversary, hosted by Rachel Hills of Musings of an Inappropriate Woman.

Next month’s DUFC is hosted by A Shiny new Coin. Send your favourite posts from the Internuts here, or email them to shinynewcoin at gmail dot com.

Here’s two bonus links: A thoughtful response to the burqa post by That’s So Pants, and the wonderful Werner Herzog Reads Madeline (H/T Tigtog).

Update – Important – please, everybody, sign up to this before the next election. Also via Tigtog.

Well, what are you waiting for?

No, not the guy who can catch a laptop in his buttocks, although that is definitely up there. I mean the Lovelace and Babbage graphic novel / blog.

Lovelace and Babbage is a steampunk cartoon blog started by the wonderful Sydney Padua, who describes herself as “an animator, story artist, and tiresome bore [yeah, right] working mostly in visual effects in London.” She’s a friend of Suw Charman, the originator of Ada Lovelace Day, which led to “Wouldn’t it be hee-larious if there was a comic about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage fighting crime? Thanks, I’ll be here all week!”

Start here, with Lovelace: The Origin.

Follow the links at the top bloggy-style, and enjoy.

He mentioned that he’d had a poem set in class by someone called “Ogden Nash” and that was the quintessence of stupid.

Reader, I did what anyone would have done in my place (i.e. obsessive Ogden Nash reader when young.) I ran to the bookcase and searched until I’d found the aged brown copy of Good Intentions, rescued from the last big cull of family books, bought by my mum, who died in the Summer of Love, 1968. I wanted to show HWMNBN that Ogden Nash wrote wacky and offbeat poetry which ought to be right up his alley.

My parents were of a generation that wrote their names and dates of purchase on book flyleaves, so I looked inside the dessicated brown cover and I found this. See over the fold: My mum must have bought this from a second hand bookshop.

Pronunciation: \ˈklād\ : Function: noun : Etymology: Greek klados

: a group of biological taxa (as species) that includes all descendants of one common ancestor.

Many of you are familiar with Chris Clarke, US environmental writer and all-round awesum blogger.

If you like his stuff, you might be interested to know he’s started an environmental blog, The Clade.

It appears it’s not parochial to the US or California. When I went there just now, the top story was from South Australia!

When you’ve finished looking around that site, read this – it’s beautiful.
 
 
 
Crossposted at Larvatus Prodeo

A friend of mine, who was a jewellery maker and silversmith, decided she needed to brush up on her hand drawing technique and bought a book called Drawing on the right Side of the Brain. As I remember (this is a while back) the book used exercises like “‘upside down drawing’, ‘blind contour’ and ‘modified contour’ drawing. A whole chapter is devoted to negative space drawing”. It approached drawing in a way that was diametrically opposed to my then idea of a technique that started mostly with outlines. That’s as close a simile as I can find to describe Tracy Crisp’s writing. In the Ozblogosphere, we know Tracy as Thirdcat.

Black Dust Dancing is Tracy Crisp’s first novel. It’s set in a provincial town dominated by a lead smelter, a blokey setting but the women in the novel are kept firmly front and centre.

Oh, and I’d like to know – as the mother of two primary school-aged boys, how does Tracy get the voice and manner of a teenage girl so exactly? It’s uncanny.

Deborah Strange Land:

I have clear visual images of Suzie the hairdresser, and Vicki the doctor’s receptionist, and Libby the mother-in-law, which I have not because Tracy wastes words in drawn-out descriptions, but because I have a sense of the sort of people they are, and then just a few words are enough to flesh out their physical realisation.
…The action comes in conversations and small movements, the little actions and pauses of everyday life. They all build together, piece by piece…

Piece by piece: if you’ve read Tracy’s blogopera, Adelaide Sprawls, you’ve experienced the way she builds a world this way. I loved Adelaide Sprawls, and it frustrated the hell out of me, because the vignettes were like pieces of a vast jigsaw that’s only just begun, with a smattering of pieces in the centre and one or two out on each side, with no bigger picture visible. I was eager to get my hands on Black Dust Dancing but I wondered whether I’d love it or chuck it across the room, unable to understand What in Hell Is Going On. Well, reader, you’ll have a pretty good idea what goes on in this novel, but you need to pay attention. It has the courage of its convictions, but it’s not going to yell at you. There are some story strands that are murkier than others, and there is a point where things do get murkier and more obscure, then tail off. Like real life.

Black Dust Dancing is a story you’re shown, not told, as Deborah says, by the little actions and pauses- the negative space- of everyday life. Jokes, complaints, gestures, eavesdropped gossip and asides. It seems to deal in little things, but out of these little things, big things grow.

While I’m still too busy doing other things, check out the latest Downunder Feminists’ carnival, brought to you by Stephiepenguin.

Oh, and in other news, Exploding boy finds my blog. I’ve been told.

This is an expanded version of a review I did for the Big Issue, thanks to Jo for the opportunity.

When I read in the AGE op-ed page that a book would be coming out in 2008, to be called The Great Feminist Denial, the title led me to expect another (as the authors call it) “feminism-gone-wrong story”. If we’re to believe the media, feminism is responsible for everything from low birthrates to the women in Sex And the City.

If post feminism implied that we could move on from feminism because it had already succeeded, the new millennium version… invites us to abandon feminism as a failure that has actually made womens’ lives worse.

But Dux and Simic ask: how accurate is the popular image of feminism that’s held up for constant criticism? The answer is, not very. “(B)efore feminism can make sense, we need to get past a huge wall of bullshit. So, let’s unpack a bit of that bullshit.”

This book is equally readable for the self-identified feminist and those who don’t know much about it. (Who was Andrea Dworkin really? was she as scary as people make out?) It also has a great time demolishing lots of strawfeminists: “[The] poster girls for feminism-gone-wrong: the deluded pole dancer, a victim of false feminist ‘empowerment’; the thirty-something career woman who will miss out on babies because feminism told her she could have it all; …the heiress without panties; the actress with an eating disorder; the pop star with a shaved head; the oppressed Muslim woman whom feminism ignored and abandoned…” and many more.

But also, look – Hoydens!

Hoyden About Town [is] one of our favourite blogs…

The Hoyden About Town community started off with just one person- ‘tigtog’, who started blogging in 2005. Since then she’s blogged extensively at Larvatus Prodeo, one of Australia’s more lively left-wing blogs, and helped launch Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog, a one-stop shop for all your feminist queries. Click under “Stop the Strawfeminist”, for instance, and you’ll find answers to frequently asked questions such as “aren’t feminist just hairy legged makeup haters?” and “Don’t women have ‘female’ privilege?” In March 2007, tigtog invited Lauredhel to share Hoyden duties with her. With tigtog in New South Wales, and Lauredhel in Western Australia, the Hoydens have only met face to face once. But in cyberspace geography is no obstacle.
…To those who caricature blogging as “slacktivism”, Lauredhel is dismissive: “I have a strong belief in the power of words as well as in the power of non-verbal actions. I don’t think talking is the only answer, the only type of activism; but I think it’s under-rated.”
…tigtog: “Keeping track of and exposing the bullshit, that is essential. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. The crucial tool in keeping the backlash contained (and shrinking it) is to debunk it and make it more and more ridiculous.”

The book’s failing, as Lauredhel and many others point out, is that in their haste to disasssociate from “cliches” of the textbook Radical Hairy Feminist, they place too much emphasis on “we’re all quite feminine, really”. In doing so, they do marginalise women who are “ugly” and “fat” (I think the authors, being young, might not quite have internalised the sad fact that most of us have been consigned to this patriarchal dustbin once we reach a certain age.) In the op-ed article which are came out today, this argument is placed too much to the front and caricatured into “Oh, no, we wouldn’t dream of looking ugly or fat or hairy or any of those things, We’re normal and nice, please love us.” In their eagerness to throw off balance what they know is an essentially hostile audience (see chapter 1), they make the mistake of coming over all submissive. As a much loved radfem points out, most women perform femininity as a necessary survival skill, but it’s disappointing that that should be the central point of an op-ed article on this book, which really has so much more to offer. (Note, Lauredhel has pointed out that it was largely the AGE op-ed by Monica which she herself is referring to, also, my remark about “submissive” is about the article too – the book is much more robust).

If you’re “not a feminist, but…” you need it. If you’re an antifeminist, I dare you to read it.